Actually, owning a gun makes you much, much more likely to be killed by a gun, as the vast majority of gun deaths in the U.S. are domestic or self inflicted. Fantasy "protect myself from those evil people" scenarios almost never happen, and it's more often that it results in friendly fire. But, whatever makes one feel safer to themselves, I guess.
Billyblobber
JoinedPosts by Billyblobber
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VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
@Billyblobber
Both Dylan Roof and this latest nutcase could have sought help. They chose not to.
Lots of people, sane or otherwise, get fired from their jobs.
Even mentally ill people must take at least some responsibility for their actions.
"Responsibility for their actions" does nothing to fix the core problems. Focusing on punishment is basically a religious/Bible viewpoint that takes any pressure for helping to fix the issues in the world out of the individual while placing wrongdoers in a separate "other" category that removes any relation to them. "The evil must be punished for being evil, don't worry about anything else, God will fix all the problems in the world in the end" is what many people were brought up, and it translates now into them focusing on retribution instead of solving.
A big part of Root's issue was that his particular brand of issues found a nurturing environment in extreme right wing and racist communities and ideology that festers among the Internet. This one is tied into the media glorification and focus on spree killers. Both of these things can actually be addressed and mitigated to a degree to lower the chances of similar things happening in the future. We can also address the lack of mental health system, help people to recognize possible issues before they crop out, and lower the stigmatism around mental health problems. It would be NICE to also be able to address the gun society in America, but, unfortunately, that has become so politicized that anything realistic happening is practically impossible at this point. Those are the things you focus on if you actually want to help fix the situation as opposed to making oneself feel better, which is all things like "pay for their actions" accomplishes.
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324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
Sure you can correlate emotions with mental health but is it true in every case like this? A thug, who's mad at society and mad about his life, goes out and kills some people. Is he mentally ill?
The gunman was suffering from bouts of extreme paranoia, with management and coworkers having suggested to him multiple times to get medical help, as his paranoia was to the point of apparently hallucinating or imagining things happen that weren't actually happening (see the watermelon thing quoted earlier). Dylan Root's attack on the black church combined with his firing seems to have completely set off his paranoia to the tipping point where the thought a race war was actually happening to him (see his statements), which prompted this. So, yes, it was a large issue here, as documented in the information released about the case. -
324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
Those of us that talk about things like mental health are not doing it to "make excuses" or whatever strawmen are flying around at the time.
Those are the people that see the nuance to problems on the societal level and then attempt to figure out ways to fix or alleviate those problems. When talking about mental health, it's talking about restoring the infrastructure that was removed in the 80s in America to help those with problems, and also to remove the stigma that centers around mental health so that problems that lead to things like this can be addressed before they turn into things like this, more often.
"Pointing blame" or simply labeling people as "evil" or whatever only serves to make the person who says those things feel better about life and play into just-world fallacy. It's easier to just say "some people are evil" than to think that friends/family/neighbors are just a bad day or a further shift in chemicals from doing something horrible. Thats also why people would rather focus on criminal punishment than the society that leads people to being criminals, clear black and white lines of "good" and "bad" just make the world less scary to them.
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324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
This is the kind of stuff that led him to kill coworkers:
“The watermelon would appear, then disappear, then appear and disappear again … only to appear yet again. This was not an innocent incident. The watermelon was placed in a strategic location where it would be visible to newsroom employees (and others) entering and exiting the building. It appeared after a meeting during which ‘watermelon’ comments were discussed.”
He says the watermelon was part of “a carefully orchestrated effort by the photography staff to oust me – a conspiracy.”
Sounds like the hallmarks of paranoia, which goes hand in hand with a few different mental issues. -
324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
Give his other letters that are coming out, I'd definitely say that he had some serious unchecked mental issues, given his ridiculously high amount of paranoia.
Since we can't "fix" the lack of gun control in this country because of the amount that already exist freely, and the amount of lobbying power the NRA has, the next best option is to focus on the underlying mental issues and lack of mental health in the country if the end goal is "less people dying." This is similar to working on the underlying social issues that cause crime in the first place to solve widespread crime issues. But again, that's if someone's focus is to make things better for everyone.
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324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
If the races of the perpetrator and victims were reversed, there would be national outrage and hand-wringing, protest marches, demands for reform, etc., etc. Not to mention the requisite burning and looting of the homes and businesses of people who just happen to be nearby.
You mean like with Dylan Root...where those things oddly did -not- happen? And, no, a hockey game wasn't lost, so I wouldn't expect any rioting. -
324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
Wing Commander, don't forget gun related suicides, which are the largest number of gun deaths in the country, if I remember correctly. -
324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
Mental health -is- a huge problem in America as compared to other places because Reagan pretty much started the ball rolling on completely destroying the mental health support structure in America, with Bush 1 and Clinton putting the nail in the coffin. With most of our large mental health facilities closed, we don't have a very good infrastructure at all in place to handle mental health on the large scale needed across the country. -
324
VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account
by WingCommander inanyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.
bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.
i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.
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Billyblobber
Gun control works well in other countries; the U.S. is notoriously horrible with both gun violence and portion of the population in jail (and length of prison time, and a ton of in-prison issues, etc.).
Unfortunately, Pandora's Box has already been opened, and there are so many guns already circulating in the country that they're impossible to "ban" in any fashion at this point.
Stricter regulations on obtaining them would be a HELP, but the pro-gun crowd has been made so paranoid by media, politics, and conspiracy lunatics that any forward legislation in that aspect would be taken as the first step to the government banning them, so they'd never go along with it at all.